What We Are Reading Today: The Teacher in the Machine

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Updated 26 April 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: The Teacher in the Machine

  • Scholars at Stanford, MIT, and the University of Illinois in the 1960s and 1970s were encouraged by the US government to experiment with computers and AI in education

Author: Anne Trumbore

From AI tutors who ensure individualized instruction but cannot do math to free online courses from elite universities that were supposed to democratize higher education, claims that technological innovations will transform education often fall short.

Yet, as Anne Trumbore shows in “The Teacher in the Machine,” the promises of today’s cutting-edge technologies aren’t new. Scholars at Stanford, MIT, and the University of Illinois in the 1960s and 1970s were encouraged by the US government to experiment with computers and AI in education.